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Unknown to History: The Captivity of Mary of Scotland
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
417 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1882
70 people are currently reading
279 people want to read
About the author
Charlotte Mary Yonge
700 books72 followersCharlotte Mary Yonge was an English novelist, known for her huge output, now mostly out of print.
She began writing in 1848, and published during her long life about 160 works, chiefly novels. Her first commercial success, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), provided the funding to enable the schooner Southern Cross to be put into service on behalf of George Selwyn. Similar charitable works were done with the profits from later novels. Yonge was also a founder and editor for forty years of The Monthly Packet, a magazine (founded in 1851) with a varied readership, but targeted at British Anglican girls (in later years it was addressed to a somewhat wider readership).
Among the best known of her works are The Heir of Redclyffe, Heartsease, and The Daisy Chain. A Book of Golden Deeds is a collection of true stories of courage and self-sacrifice. She also wrote Cameos from English History, Life of John Coleridge Patteson: Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands and Hannah More. Her History of Christian Names was described as "the first serious attempt at tackling the subject" and as the standard work on names in the preface to the first edition of Withycombe's The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, 1944.
Her personal example and influence on her god-daughter, Alice Mary Coleridge, played a formative role in Coleridge's zeal for women's education and thus, indirectly, led to the foundation of Abbots Bromley School for Girls.
After her death, her friend, assistant and collaborator, Christabel Coleridge, published the biographical Charlotte Mary Yonge: her Life and Letters (1903).
-Wikipedia
The Charlotte Mary Yonge Fellowship, a website with lots of information.
See Charlotte's character page for books about her.
She began writing in 1848, and published during her long life about 160 works, chiefly novels. Her first commercial success, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), provided the funding to enable the schooner Southern Cross to be put into service on behalf of George Selwyn. Similar charitable works were done with the profits from later novels. Yonge was also a founder and editor for forty years of The Monthly Packet, a magazine (founded in 1851) with a varied readership, but targeted at British Anglican girls (in later years it was addressed to a somewhat wider readership).
Among the best known of her works are The Heir of Redclyffe, Heartsease, and The Daisy Chain. A Book of Golden Deeds is a collection of true stories of courage and self-sacrifice. She also wrote Cameos from English History, Life of John Coleridge Patteson: Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands and Hannah More. Her History of Christian Names was described as "the first serious attempt at tackling the subject" and as the standard work on names in the preface to the first edition of Withycombe's The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, 1944.
Her personal example and influence on her god-daughter, Alice Mary Coleridge, played a formative role in Coleridge's zeal for women's education and thus, indirectly, led to the foundation of Abbots Bromley School for Girls.
After her death, her friend, assistant and collaborator, Christabel Coleridge, published the biographical Charlotte Mary Yonge: her Life and Letters (1903).
-Wikipedia
The Charlotte Mary Yonge Fellowship, a website with lots of information.
See Charlotte's character page for books about her.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
February 16, 2013
I have always been interested in Scottish history and this novel is based on the period of Mary Queen of Scots imprisonment by her cousin Queen Elizabeth the First. Tideswell, Chatsworth and Buxton are mentioned.
The story starts with Susan, a respectable wife of a sea going knight who had just lost a child, a girl, when her husband returns home with a girl-child who had been tied to the body of a woman and both lashed to the mast of a ship which was shipwrecked. All crew and passengers have disappeared. The dead woman the child was tied to was too old to have been the child's mother.
When the knight arrives home with the babe she is undressed and mysterious tattoo marks are found on her body and also gold jewellery and a long strip of paper with writing on it. These items are locked away out of sight.
The child is brought up by the knight and his good lady.
Later in the story the knight comes into contact with Queen Elizabeth's intelligence men and recognised the simularity of the messages they are decoding to the strip of paper his wife had hidden away.
He takes home the knowledge of how to decode and takes out the strip of paper and discovers his adopted daughter's lineage.
One day a sailor off his old ship arrives and talks of the babe they had saved. The sailor is overheard by the child who knew nothing of her arrival in their home before this.
I won't tell any more of the story but it is a good tale.
Occasionally a character will speak and his/her words are written in "old Scots" but in the main the language is very readable.
There was a time half way through the book when I thought I would not finish it but worth reading to the end.
Because of a lack of a book or story's contents a lot of these free books (or cheap ones) are not being selected.
This is the same review I did for the Amazon website for the book which I bought for my Kindle.
The story starts with Susan, a respectable wife of a sea going knight who had just lost a child, a girl, when her husband returns home with a girl-child who had been tied to the body of a woman and both lashed to the mast of a ship which was shipwrecked. All crew and passengers have disappeared. The dead woman the child was tied to was too old to have been the child's mother.
When the knight arrives home with the babe she is undressed and mysterious tattoo marks are found on her body and also gold jewellery and a long strip of paper with writing on it. These items are locked away out of sight.
The child is brought up by the knight and his good lady.
Later in the story the knight comes into contact with Queen Elizabeth's intelligence men and recognised the simularity of the messages they are decoding to the strip of paper his wife had hidden away.
He takes home the knowledge of how to decode and takes out the strip of paper and discovers his adopted daughter's lineage.
One day a sailor off his old ship arrives and talks of the babe they had saved. The sailor is overheard by the child who knew nothing of her arrival in their home before this.
I won't tell any more of the story but it is a good tale.
Occasionally a character will speak and his/her words are written in "old Scots" but in the main the language is very readable.
There was a time half way through the book when I thought I would not finish it but worth reading to the end.
Because of a lack of a book or story's contents a lot of these free books (or cheap ones) are not being selected.
This is the same review I did for the Amazon website for the book which I bought for my Kindle.
October 16, 2019
Yonge may not have the stylistic grace of a Conrad, Dickens, or Elizabeth Bronte, but she creates realistic characters as well as any of them. I am old fashioned, and prefer my fiction to have a strong moral element. Some may find Yonge's depiction of heroes as unrealistically saintly. Today, people prefer well-motivated villains and flawed heroes who are often indistinguishable. I hate that. I have never met anyone in my life who is truly villainous (thank heavens), but I have met plenty of saintly people. Yonge gives us well-motivated villains, but she also provides well-motivated saints. I don't see why it is realistic to believe a person can be gradually corrupted until they are nearly purely evil, but unrealistic to believe that a person can be gradually purified until they are nearly purely good. The potential for either is within all of us. I'd rather be moved by purification than by corruption. But then that's probably just me.
May 2, 2019
Historical fiction which brings to life the many factors of living in the middle of life or death struggle between Catholic and Protestant forces in Queen Elizabeth’s England. The story has a young heroine in Cicely Talbot, a baby rescued from the sea and raised in a Protestant home, but actually a daughter of the Catholic queen, Mary of Scotland. She and Mary find each other as well as common ground, so that when Mary’s trial and execution are described, the reader feels the sacred loss of family and life.
April 4, 2024
Charlotte Mary Yonge is famed for her young-adult novels with a Christian message. ‘Unknown To History’ is an imaginative reconstruction of the imprisonment of Mary Stuart in Chartley Manor in England. Although the basic premise is far-fetched, in essence the story could have been grounded in historical fact. Most of the characters present are actual historical persons. The charm lies in the depiction of the players in the story. Bess of Hardwick and the Queen of the Scots fight their eternal battle with no punches pulled, but lesser actors like the Earl of Shrewsbury, or the teenaged Anthony Babington, the unfortunate Talbot family, the ladies in waiting and the gentlemen of the Queen's Household lived and died as described. Even the tragic Arbella Stuart makes her personality felt, as a prisoner in swaddling clothes in the household of Bess of Hardwick.
The inception of the so-called Babington Plot correspondence is detailed at some length, and helps to confirm the official line that it was an underhanded conspiracy to assassinate the Queen of England. This is also the dividing line between not two but three religions – Catholicism, English Protestantism, and a Knoxian Puritanism imported from Scotland. How the representatives of the three faiths face off is recounted crisply but with distinct clarity as to the writer's own views.
Although intended for young readers, the revival of interest in historical fiction, and in the Tudors especially, makes this book very relevant for modern-day fans of historical novels, tense, dramatic, action-oriented and focussing on ultimately one of the saddest moments in English history. Mary of Scots may or may not have had beauty, but she was nearly ten years younger than Elizabeth, who possessed several powerful qualities but could not be accused of being beautiful; Mary Stuart also exercised a literally fatal charm over those who lived with her. Not one of the actors in the drama of her life survived with their lives or their reputation and integrity intact. Even Queen Elizabeth herself came out of the affair, and the execution of her cousin, with her own character tarnished. To this day, this one decision of hers, approving the beheading of her cousin, is the one act on which she is judged.
The inception of the so-called Babington Plot correspondence is detailed at some length, and helps to confirm the official line that it was an underhanded conspiracy to assassinate the Queen of England. This is also the dividing line between not two but three religions – Catholicism, English Protestantism, and a Knoxian Puritanism imported from Scotland. How the representatives of the three faiths face off is recounted crisply but with distinct clarity as to the writer's own views.
Although intended for young readers, the revival of interest in historical fiction, and in the Tudors especially, makes this book very relevant for modern-day fans of historical novels, tense, dramatic, action-oriented and focussing on ultimately one of the saddest moments in English history. Mary of Scots may or may not have had beauty, but she was nearly ten years younger than Elizabeth, who possessed several powerful qualities but could not be accused of being beautiful; Mary Stuart also exercised a literally fatal charm over those who lived with her. Not one of the actors in the drama of her life survived with their lives or their reputation and integrity intact. Even Queen Elizabeth herself came out of the affair, and the execution of her cousin, with her own character tarnished. To this day, this one decision of hers, approving the beheading of her cousin, is the one act on which she is judged.
September 2, 2019
4.5 stars. What a lovely book! I listened on Librivox, narrated by Tanica, and I think she hit it out of the park. I may have found a few parts of the book tedious if I had been reading it myself instead of listening, but her narration drew me in and brought this beautiful literature to life.
The kids and I are studying Queen Elizabeth’s reign in history right now, so this was perfect for me to read on the side. I’ll have them read the book next time we cycle through this time period and they are a bit older. Yonge’s story helped me get a sense of the palpable tensions between Protestants/Catholics that were felt in the 1500s.
The characters are splendid and grow in your esteem until you can’t help loving them.
The kids and I are studying Queen Elizabeth’s reign in history right now, so this was perfect for me to read on the side. I’ll have them read the book next time we cycle through this time period and they are a bit older. Yonge’s story helped me get a sense of the palpable tensions between Protestants/Catholics that were felt in the 1500s.
The characters are splendid and grow in your esteem until you can’t help loving them.
November 24, 2024
Incredible
“I liked it!” -9-year-old boy :) “It was about Mary Queen of Scots, focusing on an unknown daughter. The daughter had been picked up from a shipwreck and raised by a kind and trustworthy English family, the Talbots.”
The characters in this book come to life. This book provides a close-up look at the complicated relationship between Puritans and Catholics at the time. As well as a fantastic way to consider vices and virtues.
“I liked it!” -9-year-old boy :) “It was about Mary Queen of Scots, focusing on an unknown daughter. The daughter had been picked up from a shipwreck and raised by a kind and trustworthy English family, the Talbots.”
The characters in this book come to life. This book provides a close-up look at the complicated relationship between Puritans and Catholics at the time. As well as a fantastic way to consider vices and virtues.
June 9, 2021
A long book, and verging towards tedious as the end approached, but a believable and interesting premise, well handled. Weaves a memorable picture of the times and the people involved, and gives what seems a fair portrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots.
March 1, 2024
This book has really stayed with me, though from further study it seems to be a highly colored rendition of the history.
September 26, 2024
Homeschool read
February 6, 2017
Review to follow.
October 1, 2015
Whenever I come across a free Kindle book that sounds like something I’d like to read, I send it to my Kindle. I read the books, then, in alphabetical order, which means it can take a long time to get to some of them. I came across Unknown to History recently, and had no idea where it had come from, but started reading it to see what it was about. I was pleasantly surprised to find a very clean, very interesting, historical novel from the Tudor period! I’ve always loved historical novels, and this one was superbly written. I didn’t figure out till I had finished it that it was originally written in 1882; the style of writing was surprisingly modern. Most books written that long ago are so wordy that it’s hard work to read them, but not this one. I also enjoyed the length of the book; I’m a very fast reader and enjoy a longer book that takes a few days to get through.
Read my full review here.
March 28, 2013
loved this, always been a fan of this period of history, and this book was full of plot twists and turns, right up until the end, the characters really came alive and were extremely believable. I would imagine this story would make a wonderful film.
April 7, 2011
Interesting, but I've had my fill of the intrigues, secrets, power plays, wars, crimes in the name of religion--oh, what am I saying? What's changed?
May 14, 2013
Not bad but I found it a bit lacking in style.
September 23, 2024
This book was by turns slow and then interesting, believable and then far fetched. However, over all it was enjoyable, true to the time period, and had a happy ending so: five stars.
November 5, 2012
awesome!
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews